The fat phase of margarine and of similar fat continuous emulsion spreads is often a mixture of a liquid fat or oil and a fat which is solid at room and/or ambient temperature.
The solid fat, denoted as hardstock fat, serves to structure the fat phase and helps to stabilise the emulsion.
For nutritional reasons in recent years the desire is expressed that the level of saturated fatty acids (SAFA) of the fats should be kept as low as possible.
W/O emulsion spreads have been on the market for some time aiming to meet this need. Typically, the margarine fat of these products consists of about 87% liquid oil, e.g. sunflower oil and 13% of a hardstock consisting of a randomly interesterified mixture of fully hardened lauric fat, e.g. fully hardened palmkernel oil, and fully hardened palm oil.
Nowadays there are consumers who express concern about chemically modifying fats e.g. by hydrogenating or hardening, which may result in trans-unsaturation if partial hardening is involved.
To meet the need for spreads with low contents of SAFA in the margarine fat which have been produced without using hydrogenation, CA 2 098 314 proposes to prepare hardstock by chemically interesterifying a blend of generally equal proportions of palm stearin and palmkernel stearin.
This approach of CA 2 098 314 results in products with higher SAFA contents and lower cis unsaturated fatty acid (UFA) contents.
WO96/19115 describes a plastic W/O emulsion spread comprising 5-14 wt % of a hardstock being a stearin fraction of an interesterified mixture of 25-65 wt %, unhardened lauric fat stearin and 75-35 wt % unhardened C16+ fat stearin.
In addition there is also a trend towards lower fat spreads. The hardstock described above are not very suitable for low fat spread which still have a relatively large amount of poly unsaturated fatty acids (PUFA).
Often an additional hardstock is needed to structure the low fat spreads.
Furthermore these known margarine fats contain appreciable amounts of lauric acids. The presence of lauric acids may have a negative impact on the flavour of the product, because of hydrolysis that occurs during storage.
There is therefore a need for margarine fats that are as good as the prior art products in respect of nutritional properties as well as the sensoric properties of the resulting spreads, but that have been produced without the use of hydrogenation. Furthermore a hardstock fat is needed that is suitable for low fat high PUFA spreads. Moreover a margarine fat with less lauric fatty acids is preferred.
We have now found that one or more of the above mentioned objectives can be reached by a hardstock fat having an amount of saturated fatty acids of at least 80 wt %, wherein the amount of H3mixed triglycerides is between 45 and 60 wt %, and wherein the amount of H2Xmixed triglycerides is at least 10 wt %.